Absolution Gap

TWENTY-TWO

Battle raged in the immediate volume of space around the Pattern Juggler planet. Near the heart of the engagement itself, and close to the geometric centre of his vast ship Zodiacal Light, Remontoire sat in a posture of perfect zenlike calm. His expression betrayed only mild interest in the outcome of current events. His eyes were closed; his hands were folded demurely in his lap. He looked bored and faintly distracted, like a man about to doze off in a waiting room.

Remontoire was not bored, nor was he about to doze off. Boredom was a condition of consciousness he barely remembered, like anger or hate or the thirst for mother’s milk. He had experienced many states of mind since leaving Mars nearly five hundred years earlier, including some that could only be approximated in the flat, limiting modalities of baseline human language. Being bored was not amongst them. Nor did he expect it to play a significant role in his mental affairs in the future, most certainly not while the wolves were still around. And he wasn’t very likely to experience sleep, either.

Now and then some part of him—his eyelids, or even his entire head—twitched minutely, betraying something of the extreme state of non-boredom he was actually experiencing. Tactical data surged incessantly through his mind with the icy clarity of a mountain torrent. He was actually running his mind at a dangerously high clock-rate, just barely within the cooling parameters of his decidedly old-fashioned Conjoiner mental architecture. Skade would have laughed at him now as he struggled to match a thought-processing rate that would—to her—have barely merited comment. Skade could think this fast and simultaneously fragment her consciousness into half a dozen parallel streams. And she could do it while moving around, exerting herself, whereas Remontoire had to sit in a state of trancelike stillness so as not to put additional loads on his already stressed body and mind. They really were creatures of different centuries.

But although Skade had been in his thoughts much of late, she was of no immediate concern now. He considered it likely she was dead. His suspicions had been strong enough even before he had permitted Khouri to descend into the planet’s atmosphere, following after Skade’s downed corvette, but he had been careful not to make too much of them. For if Skade was dead, then so was Aura.

Something changed: a tick and a whirr of the great dark orrery of war in which he floated. For hours me opposed forces—the baseline humans, Skade’s Conjoiners, the Inhibitors—had wheeled around the planet in a fixed formation, as if they had finally settled into some mathematical configuration of maximum stability. The other Conjoiners were cowed: for weeks they had been gaining an edge over Remontoire’s loose alliance of humans, pigs and Resurgam refugees. They had stolen Aura, and through her they had learned many of the secrets that had enabled Remontoire and his allies to outflank the Inhibitor forces around Delta Pavonis. Later, Remontoire had given them even more in return for Khouri. But since Skade’s disappearance the other Conjoiners had become confused and directionless, far more than would have been the case with an equivalent grouping from Remontoire’s generation. Skade had been too powerful, too effective at manipulation. During the war against the Demarchists (which seemed now, to Remontoire, like an innocently remembered childhood diversion) the ruthlessly democratic structure of Conjoiner politics had been gradually partitioned, with the creation of security layers: the Closed Council, the Inner Sanctum, even—perhaps—the rumoured Night Council. Skade was the logical end product of that process of compartmentalisation: highly skilled, highly resourceful, highly knowledgeable, highly adept at manipulating others. In the pressure of the war against the Demarchists, his people had—unwittingly—made a tyrant for themselves.

And Skade had been a very good tyrant. She had only wanted the best for her people, even if that meant extinction for the rest of humanity. Her single-mindedness, her willingness to transcend the limits of the flesh and the mind, had been inspirational even to Remontoire. He had very nearly chosen to fight on her side rather than Clavain’s. It was no wonder those Conjoiners around her had forgotten how to think for themselves. In thrall to Skade, there had never been any need.

But now Skade was gone, and her army of swift, brilliant puppets didn’t know what to do next.

In the last ten hours, Remontoire’s forces had intercepted twenty-eight thousand separate invitations to negotiation from the remaining Conjoiner elements, squirted through the brief windows in the sphere of jammed communications afflicting the entire theatre of battle. After all the betrayals, after all the fragile alliances and spiteful enmities, they still thought he was a man they could do business with. There was, he thought, something else as well: hints that they were worried about something he had yet to identify. It might have been a gambit to snare his attention and encourage him to talk to them, but he wasn’t sure.

He had decided to keep them waiting just a little bit longer, at least until he had some concrete data from the surface.

Now, however, something had changed. He had detected the alteration in the disposition of battle forces one-fifteenth of a second earlier; in the ensuing time nothing had happened to suggest that it was anything but real.

The Inhibitors were moving. A clump of wolf machines—they moved in clumps, aggregations, flickering clouds, rather than ordered squadrons or detachments—had left its former position. Between ninety-five and ninety-nine per cent of the wolf assets around p Eridani 40—estimated by mass, or volume (it was difficult to be sure how much wolf machinery had actually followed them from Delta Pavonis)—held station, but according to the sensor returns, which could not always be trusted, the small aggregate—between one and five per cent of the total force—was on its way to the planet.

It accelerated smoothly, leaving physics squirming in its wake. When Inhibitor machinery moved, it did so without any hint of Newtonian reaction. The recent modifications to the Conjoiner drives had approximated something of the same effect by making the exhaust particles undergo rapid decay into a non-observable quantum state. But the wolves used a different principle. Even up close, there was no hint of any thrusting medium. The best guess—and guess it was—was that the Inhibitor drives employed a form of the quantum Casimir effect, using the unbalanced vacuum pressure on two parallel plates to skip themselves through space-time. The fact that the machines accelerated several trillion times faster than theory allowed was deemed slightly less embarrassing than having no theory at all.

He ran a simulation, predicting the flight path of the aggregate. It might fracture into smaller elements, or combine with another, but if it continued on its present course, it was destined to skim the planet’s immediate airspace.

This troubled Remontoire. So far the alien machines had avoided coming that close. It was as if, scripted deep into their controlling routines, was an edict, a fundamental command to avoid unnecessary contact with Pattern Juggler worlds.

But humans had taken the battle to the waterlogged planet. How deep did that edict run? Perhaps the visible downing of Skade’s corvette had tripped some switch, the damage already done. Perhaps Inhibitor machinery had already entered the biosphere. In which case even this Juggler planet might not be safe for very much longer.

The aggregate had been underway for nearly a second, from Remontoire’s point of view. Assuming the usual acceleration curves, it would reach the planet’s airspace in under forty minutes. In his present state of consciousness, that would seem like an eternity. But Remontoire knew better than to believe that.

Remontoire’s trident-shaped ship departed from the parking bay in the side of the Zodiacal Light. Almost immediately he felt the spinal compression as the main drive came on, as hard and unforgiving as a fall on to concrete. The hull creaked and protested as the acceleration ramped up through five, six, seven gees. The single outrigger-mounted engine was a microminiature Conjoiner drive, engineered with watchmaker precision, every component squeezed down to neurotic tolerances. It would have made Remontoire nervous, had he permitted himself to feel nervousness.

He was the only living thing aboard the recently manufactured ship. Even he seemed something of an afterthought, crammed into a tiny eyelike hollow in the long carbon-black needle of the hull. There were no windows, and only the bare minimum of sensor apertures, but through his implants Remontoire barely perceived the little craft, sensing it only as a glassy extension of his personal space. Beyond the hard boundaries of the ship was a less tangible sphere of sensor coverage: passive and active contacts tickling the part of his brain associated with the proprioceptive knowledge of his own body image.

The thrust levelled out at eight gees. There was no inertial protection against that acceleration, even though bulk control of inertia had been within the reach of Conjoiner technology for more than half a century. It couldn’t be allowed. The other technology that the ship carried—the glittering, tinsel-like ma-chinery of the hypometric weapon—was highly intolerant of alterations to the local metric. The hypometric weapons were difficult enough to use in nearly flat, unmolested space-time. But within the influence of inertial technology they became malevolently unpredictable, like spiteful imps. Remontoire would have liked to have accelerated even harder, but above eight gees there was a real danger of shifting the weapon’s tiny components out of alignment.

The weapon itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Shrouded in a cigar-shaped nacelle flung out as an extension from the same outrigger that held the drive, there was no muzzle, no exhaust, no surface detailing of any kind. The only design constraint had been to arrange for the weapon to be as far from the human occupant as possible. It was, Remontoire thought, a measure of the device’s threatening glamour that he actually felt safer with the dangerous, unstable miniature Con-joiner drive between him and the quixotic weapon.

He checked the progress of the Inhibitor aggregate, neither gratified nor disappointed to see that it was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Something had changed, though: his departure from the Zodiacal Light had drawn the attention of the other protagonists. One of Skade’s former allies was moving on an intercept trajectory with his ship at a higher acceleration than he could sustain. The other Conjoiner craft would engage him within fifteen minutes. Five or six minutes after that, a second aggregate would have reached him.

Remontoire allowed himself a flicker of disquiet, just enough to pump some adrenalin into his blood. Then he blocked it, the way one slammed the door on a boisterous party.

He knew, rationally, that the logical thing would have been to remain on the Zodiacal Light, where his co-ordination and insight were most valued. He could have programmed a beta-level simulation of himself to fly this ship, or asked for a volunteer. There would have been dozens of willing candidates, some of whom had been equipped with Conjoiner implants of their own. But he had insisted on taking the ship himself. It wasn’t just because he had spent more time than most of them learning the ways of the hypometric weapon. There was also a sense of obligation: it was something he had to do.

It was, he knew, because of Ana Khouri. He had made a mistake in letting her travel down to the planet on her own. From a military perspective it had been exactly the right thing to do: no point committing already overstretched resources when there was every likelihood that Aura was already dead. More than that, he thought, when there was every chance that Aura had already been as useful to them as she was ever going to be. Also, nothing much larger than an escape capsule had stood a chance of reaching the surface anyway, with the Inhibitor blockade in maximum effect.

But Clavain wouldn’t have seen it that way. Nine times out of ten he had based his decisions upon the strict application of military sense. He wouldn’t have lived through five hundred years otherwise. But one time out often he would disregard the rules entirely and do something that made no sense except on a humane level.

Remontoire thought it likely that this would have been one of those occasions. No matter that Skade and Aura were probably both dead: Clavain would have gone down with Khouri even if the rescue attempt itself was almost guaranteed to end in their deaths.

Time and again over the years Remontoire had examined the minutiae of Clavain’s life, the critical points, trying to work out if those irrational acts had helped or hindered his old friend. He reviewed Clavain’s decisions once more while he waited for the Conjoiner ship to meet him. As always he arrived at no satisfactory answer. But he had decided that this was a time when he needed to live by Clavain’s rules rather than the rigid gamesmanship of tactical analysis.

A clock rang in his brain. His fifteen minutes were up.

There had been no point thinking about the approaching Conjoiner ship before it arrived: a quick review of the options had shown him that nothing would be gained by deviating from his present course.

The other ship pushed through his concentric sensor boundaries like a fish nosing through sharply defined sea currents. In his mind’s eye it became a tangible thing rather than a vague hint in the sensor data.

It was a moray-class corvette like Skade’s craft, just as light-suckingly black as Remontoire’s ship, but shaped more like a weirdly barbed fish-hook than the trident form of his own machine. Even at close range, the spectral whisper of its highly stealthed drives was barely detectable. On average, its hull radiated at a chill 2.7 kelvin above absolute zero. Up close, in the microwave spectrum, it was a quilt of hot and cold spots. He mapped the emplacement of cryo-arithmetic engines; observed those that were functioning less efficiently than their neighbours; observed also those that were running worryingly cold, teetering on the edge of algorithmic-cycle runaway. The occasional blue flicker sparked as one of the nodes dropped below I kelvin, before being dragged back into lockstep with its cohorts.

Ships could be made arbitrarily cold, and could therefore be made to blend in with the background radiation of the early universe, which was still shining after fifteen billion years. But the background map was not smooth: cosmic inflation had magnified tiny flaws in the expanding universe to produce subtle variations in the background, depending on which way one looked. They were deviations from true anisotropy: wrinkles in the face of creation. Unless they could adjust their hull temperatures to match those fluctuations, ships could only achieve an imperfect match with the background spectrum. Under some circumstances, hunting for those tiny signs of mismatch was the only way to detect enemy ships at all.

But the Conjoiner ship was maintaining the coldness of its hull purely as camouflage against Inhibitor forces in the vicinity. It was making no real effort to hide itself from Remontoire. In fact, it was even trying to speak to him.

There was one thing about Conjoiners that even the non-augmented had to admire: they didn’t give up. Twenty-eight thousand unanswered requests for negotiation wouldn’t deter a twenty-eight thousand and first.

Remontoire allowed the narrow line of the message laser to scribe against his hull until it found one of the few sensor patches.

He examined the transmission through copious layers of mental fire-walling. Eventually, after many seconds of cogitation, he decided that it was safe to unpack the transmission into the most sensitive parts of his own mind. The message format was in natural language rather than any of the high-level Con-joiner protocols. Nicely insulting touch, he thought: from the perspective of Skade’s allies, it was the Conjoiner equivalent of baby talk.

[Remontoire? It’s you, isn’t it? Why won’t you talk to us?]

He composed a thought in the same format. Why are you so certain I’m Remontoire?

[You were always more fond of wild gestures than you’d ever admit. This is straight out of Clavain’s book of daring escapades.]

Someone has to do it.

[It’s a brave effort, Remontoire, but it’s pointless worrying about those people on the planet. Nothing we can do can help them now. They’re not even relevant to the future outcome of the war.]

We’d best let them hang, then. That’d be Skade’s way, wouldn’t it?

[Skade would do what she could for them if she thought they were going to make a difference. But you’re only making things worse. Don’t take the battle down there. Don’t stretch things up here when we most need to consolidate our forces.]

Another plea for co-operation? Skade must be turning in her grave.

[She was a pragmatist, Remontoire, much like yourself. She would have seen that now is the time to amalgamate our parties, to pool our knowledge-base and inflict real damage on the enemy machines.]

What you mean is that you’ve achieved all you can through deception and theft. You know I’ll never trust you that way again. Now you have nothing to lose by negotiating.

[With regret, we acknowledge that tactical errors were made. But now that Skade is—as you have alluded—very probably dead… ]

The ducklings are waddling around looking for a new mother duck.

[Adopt the analogy of your choice, Remontoire. We only offer the outstretched hand of friendship. The situation here is more complex than we’ve hitherto realised. You must have seen this for yourself: the teasing hints in the data, the scraps—too small and insignificant on their own—but which add up to a clear conclusion. We’re not just dealing with wolves, Remontoire. There is something else.]

I’ve seen nothing I couldn’t explain.

[Then you haven’t been looking hard enough. Here, Remontoire: examine our data, if you doubt us. See if that changes your opinion. See if that makes it any clearer to you.]

The data nugget was scripted into his head. An instinct told him to delete it still compressed, still unread. But he decided to leave it there for the time being.

You’re suggesting a partnership?

[Disunited, we’ll never beat them. Together, we could make a difference.]

Perhaps. But it’s not me you really want, is it?

[Of course not, Remontoire.]

He smiled: Skade’s Conjoiners might have been leaderless, might even have been driven towards him by some instinctive imperative to fill that void, but mainly it was the hypometric weapon. It was the one technology they hadn’t managed to steal or reverse-engineer, despite Skade’s theft of Aura. All that they needed was one prototype; it didn’t even have to be intact, so long as they could reconstruct its working configuration.

Thanks for the offer, but I’m actually a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment. Why don’t we chat about this later? Say, in a few months?

[Remontoire… don’t make us do this.]

He applied lateral thrust, veering rudely away from the other ship. He mapped areas of brain function dropping in and out as the blood sloshed through his skull. A moment later the corvette shadowed him, mimicking his vicious moves with a finesse verging on the sarcastic.

[We need that weapon, Remontoire.]

So I guessed. Why didn’t you just come out and say it at the beginning?

[We wanted to give you the chance to see things our way.]

I suppose I should be grateful, in that case.

He felt his ship judder. His head lit up with damage reports, bright and geometric as a migraine. They had hit him with multiple hull-penetrating slugs targeted for ship-critical functions. It was very surgical: they wanted to leave him drifting, ripe for theft, rather than to blow his ship apart. Whether they cared about his survival was another matter entirely.

[Surrender the weapon now, Rem, and we’ll leave you with enough flight-capability to escape that wolf aggregate closing in on us.]

Sorry, but that’s not really in my plans for today.

His vessel rattled again: more vital functions faltered or dropped out of service. The ship was already trying to find work-arounds, doing its best to keep flying, but there was a limit to the damage it could soak up. He considered retaliating, but he was keen to save his conventional ordnance for the aggregates. That left the hypometric weapon itself, barely tested since its laborious calibration.

He issued the mental command that caused it to spin up to activation energy, compensating for the drift in the ship’s vector as angular momentum transferred to the shining innards of the weapon. Externally, there was no evidence of any change in the device at all. He wondered what kind of sensors the corvette had trained on him, and whether they were good enough to pick up the subtle signatures of activation.

It was a small weapon with a correspondingly limited precision and radial volume of effect (conventional terminology—things like “range” and “accuracy‘—were only vaguely applicable to hypometric weapons). But it also spun up very quickly. He tuned its scale of effect, found the solution in the complex topography of weapon parameters that corresponded to a specific point in the three-dimensional volume of surrounding space.

He re-established a communications channel to the corvette. Pull back.

[Again, don’t make us do this, Remontoire.]

The weapon discharged. In the microwave-frequency map of the corvette’s cold spots, a wound had suddenly appeared: a perfectly hemispherical bite in the side of the hull. The cryogenic temperature gradients flowed like water around a sinkhole, gyring and wheeling as they tried to find a new equilibrium. Pairs of cooling nodes locked into unstable oscillation modes.

The weapon spun up again. He put another hole in the corvette’s hull, deeper this time, so that the wound was concave.

The corvette responded. Reluctantly, he parried the ship-to-ship munitions with a spread of countermeasures while still holding some back for the Inhibitor machines.

The weapon spun up a third time. He concentrated, forcing himself to examine the solution from every angle. An error now could be fatal for all involved.

Discharge. His third attack was not visible at all. If he had done his sums correctly he had just put a spherical hole inside the ship without touching the hull. It would not have touched any vital internal systems. And—his coup de grace—the centre of the final hole would be exactly in line with the centres of the last two, to micron accuracy.

He waited a moment for the precision—and essential restraint—of his attack to sink in before contacting them again. The next one takes out your life-system. Got the message?

The corvette hesitated. Seconds oozed by, time for Skade’s acolytes to examine thousands of possible response scenarios, toying with them the way children toyed with building blocks, constructing huge, wobbling edifices of event and counter-event. Almost certainly they had not expected him to turn the weapon against them. Their best intelligence would never have suggested he had that degree of control over the weapon’s effects. Even if it had—and even if they had considered the possibility of an attack—they must have assumed he would strike at their ship’s drive core, taking it out in an instant of blinding light.

Instead, he had let them off with a warning. This wasn’t, Remontoire had thought to himself, a time to be making new enemies.

There was no further transmission. He watched, fascinated, as the cryo-arithmetic engines smoothed out the temperature gradients around the two exterior wounds, doing their best to camouflage the damage. Then the corvette flipped over, pushed its thrust to the limit and made itself scarce.

Remontoire allowed himself a miserly instant of self-congratulation. He had played that one well. His ship was still spaceworthy despite the damage it had sustained. And all he had to worry about now was the approaching aggregate of Inhibitor machines. The machines would arrive in three minutes.

Two thousand kilometres, then a thousand, then five hundred. Closer, his sensors struggled to deal with the clump of Inhibitor machines as a single entity, throwing back wildly conflicting estimates for distance, scale and geometric disposition. The best he could do was to focus his efforts on the larger nodes, refining his hull-camouflaging to provide a better line-of-sight match with the cosmic background. He adjusted his thrust vectoring, losing some acceleration but steering his ship’s exhaust beams away from the shifting concentrations of enemy machines. The exhausts were invisible, all but undetectable via the methods available to Remontoire. He hoped the same disadvantage applied to the aliens, but it paid not to take chances.

The clumps reorganised, shifting nearer. They were still too far away and too vaguely dispersed to make an effective target for the hypometric weapon. He was also wary of using it against them except as a tool of last resort. There was always the danger that he’d show it to them too many times, giving them enough data to conjure up a response. It had already happened with other weapons: time and again the Inhibitors had evolved effective defences against human technologies, including some of those already bequeathed by Aura. It was possible that the alien machines were not evolving them at all, but simply retrieving countermeasures from some ancient, jumbled racial memory. This conjecture alarmed Remontoire more than the idea that they might have developed their adaptations and responses through intelligent thinking. There was always the hope that one kind of intelligence could be beaten by the application of another kind, or that intelligence—self-regarding, prone to doubt—might even conspire in its own downfall. But what if there was no intelligence in the Inhibitor activities, just a process of archival retrieval, an utterly mindless bureaucracy of systematised extinction? The galaxy was a very old place and it had seen many clever ideas. More than likely, the Inhibitors already possessed ancient data on the humans’ new weapons and technologies. If they had not yet developed effective responses, it was only because that retrieval system was slow, the archive itself vastly distributed. What that meant was that there was nothing the humans could do, in the long run. No way to outgun the Inhibitors, except on a very local scale. Think galac-tically, think beyond the immediate handful of solar systems, and it was already over.

But through the channel of her mother, Aura had told them that it wasn’t over, not yet. According to Aura there was a means of buying time, if not outright victory, over the Inhibitors.

Snatches, fragments: that was all they could glean from Aura’s confused messages. But out of the noise had emerged hints of a signal. Time and again a cluster of words had appeared.

Hela. Quaiche. Shadows.

These were shards broken loose from a larger whole that Aura had been too young to articulate. All Remontoire could do was guess at the shape of that bigger picture, using what they had learned before Skade had kidnapped her. Skade and Aura were both gone now, he believed, but he still had those shards. They had to mean something, no matter how unlikely it appeared. And there was, tantalisingly, a clear link between two of them. Hela and Quaiche: the words meant something in association. But of the Shadows he knew nothing at all.

What were they, and what difference would they make?

The aggregate was very close now. It had begun to grope horns around either side of his ship, dark pincers flickering with buried violet lightning. Hints of cubic symmetries could now be glimpsed in sheared edges and stepped curves. He reviewed his options, taking account of the systems damaged in the Conjoiner attack. He wasn’t willing to use the hypometric weapon just yet, and doubted that he’d be able to spin up for a second attack before the undamaged elements took him out.

Ahead, the planet had grown noticeably larger. He had pushed the other aggregate from his mind, but it was still ahead of him, still skimming towards the fragile Juggler biosphere and its human parasites. Half the world was in darkness, the rest a marbled turquoise speckled by white clouds and swirling storm systems.

Remontoire made up his mind: it would have to be the bladder-mines.

In a fraction of a second, apertures popped open along the habitat hull of his trident-shaped ship. In another fraction of a second, launchers flung half a dozen melon-sized munitions in all directions. The hull clanged as the weapons were deployed.

Then there was silence.

An entire second passed, then the munitions detonated in an exactly choreographed sequence. There was no stutter of blinding-white flashes; these were not fusion devices or antimatter warheads. They were, in fact, only bombs in the very loosest sense of the word. Where each munition had detonated there was, suddenly, a twenty-kilometre-wide sphere of something just sitting there, like a rapidly inflated barrage balloon. The surface of each sphere was wrinkled, like the skin of a shrivelling fruit, shaded a purple-black and prone to nauseating surges of colour and boundary radius. Where two spheres happened to intersect—because their munitions had been closer than twenty kilometres apart when they detonated—the merged boundaries twinkled with sugary emanations of violet and pastel-blue.

The mechanisms inside the bladder mines were as intricate and unfathomable as those inside the hypometric weapon. There were even weird points of correspondence between the two technologies—odd parts that looked vaguely similar, suggesting that, perhaps, they had originated from the same species, or the same epoch of galactic history.

Remontoire’s suspicion was that the bladder-mines represented an early step towards the metric-engineering technology of the Shrouders. Whereas the Shrouders had learned how to encase entire stellar-sized volumes of space in shells of re-engineered space-time (with its own uncanny defensive properties), the bladder-mines produced unstable shells a mere twenty kilometres wide. They decayed back to normal space-time within a few seconds, popping out of existence in a shiver of exotic quanta. Where they had been, the local properties of the metric showed tiny indications of earlier stress. But the shells could never be made larger or more permanent, at least not by using the technology Aura had given them.

His spread of munitions was already decaying. The spheres popped away one by one, in random sequence.

Remontoire surveyed the damage. Where the shells had detonated, the intersected Inhibitor machinery had been ripped out of existence. There were curved mathematically smooth wounds in the groping aggregation of cubic elements. The lightning was arcing through the ruined structure, its mad flickering suggesting nothing so much as pain and rage.

Hit them when they’re down, Remontoire thought. He issued the mental command that would fling a final spread of bladder-mines into the surrounding machinery.

This time, nothing happened. Error messages stormed his brain: the launcher mechanism had failed, succumbing to damage from the earlier attack. He had been fortunate that it had worked once.

For the first time, Remontoire permitted himself more than an instant of real, blood-freezing fear. His options were now seriously diminished. He had no hull-armouring: that was another alien technology they had gleaned from Aura, but like in-ertial suppression it did not work well in proximity with the hypometric weapon. The hull-armouring came from the grubs; the h-weapon and the bladder-mines from a different culture. There were, unfortunately, compatibility issues. All he had left was the hypometric weapon and his conventional armaments, but there was still no clear focus for an attacking move.

The hull shuddered as his conventional mines were released from their hatches. Fusion detonations painted the sky. He felt the electromagnetic backwash play havoc with his implants, strobing abstract shapes through his visual field.

The Inhibitors were still there. He fired two Stinger missiles, watching them slam away on hundred-gee intercepts. Nothing happened: they hadn’t even detonated properly. He had no beam weapons, nothing more to offer.

Remontoire became very calm. His experience told him that nothing would be gained by using the hypometric weapon other than giving the machines another chance to study its operational function. He also knew that the wolves had yet to capture one of the weapons, and that he could not allow it to happen today.

He prepared the suicide command, visualising the coronet of fusion mines packed into the nacelle of the alien weapon. They would make a spectacular flash as they went off, almost as bright as the one that would follow an instant later when the Conjoiner drive went the same way. There was, he thought very little chance that either would be appreciated by spectators.

Remontoire adjusted his state of mind so that he felt no fear, no apprehension about his own death. He felt only a tingle of irritation that he would not be around to see how events unfurled. In every significant respect he approached the matter of his own demise with the bored acceptance of someone waiting to sneeze. There were, he thought, some consolations to being a Conjoiner.

He was about to execute the command when something happened. The remaining machinery began to pull away from his ship, retreating with surprising speed. Beyond the machinery, his sensors picked up suggestions of weapons discharges and a great deal of moving mass—bladder-mine detonations, the signatures subtly different from the ones he had used. Antimatter and fusion warhead bursts followed, then the streaking exhaust plumes of missiles, and finally a single massive explosion that had to be a crustbuster device.

None of it would have made much difference ordinarily, but he had weakened the Inhibitor machinery with his own assault. The mass sensor teased out the signature of a single small ship, consistent, he realised now, with a Conjoiner moray-class corvette.

He guessed that it was the same ship he had spared. They had turned around, or perhaps had shadowed him all along. Now they were doing their best to draw the Inhibitor machinery away from him. Remontoire knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the gesture was suicidal: they couldn’t hope to make it back to their faction in the engagement. Yet they had taken a decision to help him, even after their earlier attack and his refusal to hand over the hypometric weapon. Typical Conjoiner thinking, he reflected: they would not hesitate to shift tactics at the last minute if that shift was deemed beneficial to the long-term interests of the Mother Nest. They had no capacity for frustration, no capacity for shame.

They had tried to negotiate with him, and when that had failed they had tried to take what they wanted by force. That hadn’t worked either, and to rub it in he had made a show of sparing them. Was this a demonstration of their gratitude? Perhaps, he thought, but it was likely to be more for the benefit of those observing the battle, for Remontoire’s allies and the other Conjoiner factions, than for himself: let them see the brave sacrifice they had made here. Let them see the wiping clean of the slate. If twenty-eight thousand and one offers to share resources had failed, perhaps this gesture would be the thing that made a difference.

Remontoire didn’t know: not yet. He had other matters on his mind.

His ship pulled away from the entanglement of wolf and Conjoiner assets. Behind, naked energy and naked force strove to gore matter down to its fundamentals. Something absurdly bright lit up the sky, something so intense that he swore a glimmer of it reached him through the black hull of his ship.

He turned his attention to the other aggregate, the one that was now very close to the planet. At extreme magnification he saw a black mass squatting a few hours into the dayside of the planet, hovering above a specific point on the surface. It was doing something.